Tuesday 26 September 2000 21.27 EDT
First published on Tuesday 26 September 2000 21.27 EDT

Tony Blair's task yesterday was clear, even if it was daunting. He had to reassert his authority after two disastrous weeks, including a fuel crisis in which he seemed to lose his grip completely. At the same time he needed to rebut the charge that he is arrogant and out of touch. In other words, he had to show that he is both in charge and at the service of the people - no mean feat. Beyond that he also had to address the grievance at the root of the fuel revolt, by defending the very principle of taxation and spending. And, with Labour suddenly behind in the polls, he had to cheer up his own troops and reconnect with the voters who appear to be deserting him.

If that was the task, how did Mr Blair measure up? The immediate answer is pretty well. The prime minister gave an address that was shrewdly judged and adroitly delivered, ticking the political boxes one by one. It may not have satisfied those who sought a persuasive intellectual vision of the next phase of the New Labour project; the speech was more of a robust argument for traditional social democracy. Still, big ideas were probably a luxury on a day like yesterday. Mr Blair had more urgent work to do - and he did it.

He began, rightly, by addressing the most urgent concerns. In a bid to defeat the arrogance charge, he effectively said sorry for the Dome, before addressing the demand for higher state pensions. In a brilliantly brief sentence, he said simply "75p... we get the message." He struck the opposite note on fuel by refusing to bow to the protesters' demands, preferring to make a show of firm leadership, unbuffeted by the gusts of day-to-day opinion. In so doing, Tony Blair made an impressive case for representative government, explaining that we elect leaders not simply to be conduits for our daily whims but to take decisions in the long-term, collective interest. He won loud applause when he cast his government as the voice "for those who can't protest, whose voice isn't supported by the media". It was a good partisan shot at the rightwing, but it was also a cogent rejection of the current clamour for populist, direct democracy.

The bulk of the speech was an equally basic argument for government - with a full-throated defence of the activist state. Echoing Gordon Brown's barnstormer on Monday, Mr Blair happily presented Labour as the party of public services, with the Tories as the slashers and cutters. As one Blairite aide puts it, there is now "clear red water" between the two main parties. To that end, Mr Blair praised teachers, doctors and the police - implicitly telling the voters that they are getting good value for all their tax money. The fact that he praised those public services without attaching his usual demand for reform made this perhaps the most old Labour speech Tony Blair has ever delivered. Not that he forgot the new Labour voters who brought him to power. They were thrown some juicy red meat on crime - including an unrepentant revival of his ill-fated call for fixed penalty notices for "loutish behaviour," albeit stripped of its suggestion that offenders be frog-marched to cashpoint machines.

For all that calculated positioning, the highlight was the PM's unscripted cadenza about his "irreducible core" of principle. The vigilant will have cringed at his promise never to score populist points at the expense of asylum seekers: his government already did that with its war on "bogus" refugees. The sceptical will also have noticed Mr Blair's prior disclaimer that he remained a "unifier" happy to compromise with big business and even the Tory party. Even so, the party was heartened to hear that their leader has some non-negotiable values.

As for the wider electorate, the clear calculation was that Mr Blair needed to reintroduce himself to those voters who feel he has grown distant in recent months. That's why it was so effective for Mr Blair to speak apparently off-the-cuff: he was seeking to reconnect as a human being. The old charge against him was that he was "phoney Tony", that he did not believe in anything, preferring to parrot whatever message he heard from the latest focus group. By asserting that he did have some lines he would never cross, Mr Blair hoped for a Thatcher effect: earning the respect of voters for his conviction, even among those who do not agree with him.

That may be optimistic, but yesterday provided proof once again that politicians often do best when they put aside the script and simply speak. The current demand for leaders to listen and stay in touch may well be met, at least in part, by this simplest gesture: a politician talking like a person. Mr Blair was at his best when he did that - and at his worst when he lapsed into laundry lists of spending projects and new programmes. For one thing, that kind of talk can sound too much like blaming the electorate for failing to appreciate how good the government has been to them. But more importantly it fails to reach people by bombarding them with numbers and data that seem abstract. That's not a problem that can be solved by rhetorical style alone: only the experience of improved services will do that. Delivery is still Labour's best hope.

So yesterday's speech did as much as Mr Blair could realistically have hoped. He landed a few punches on the Tories, without reopening last year's war against the "forces of conservatism": now that that battle is real, he had no need to confect it in a speech. The leader also left his own party in good heart and moved to remind Britons why they liked him in the first place. He caught the right tone of humility and proffered some sound arguments. The Blair government is not back on track yet, but yesterday its leader took a crucial step forward.